About Me

My photo
Melbourne, VIC, Australia
2nd Grade Teacher at a school in Melbourne, Australia. My job: push kids to think. My passion: helping kids to tackle the life-long skill of searching for meaning, skills, answers and more questions.

Monday 18 June 2012

My General Report Comments - Wordled...





Thanks, Wordle, for offering me a most unique insight into my report comment style.  The image you see here is the result of adding my general comments into a website which gives you a visual representation of word frequency in a document.

How else could I tell that I used the word, 'work' too much?  After seeing this, I went back over my reports, pressed ctrl+f and did a search for all the times I'd said 'work'.  I found opportunities to turn 'work' into 'learning' or 'thinking'.

I noticed that some IB Learner Profile words were present (and had made the top 150)... such as 'principled', 'caring' and 'thinker', but perhaps NOT enough.  I went back in digging for places to put Learner Profile words without sounding like a broken record or, Heavens forbid, a cut-and-paster.

I loved that 'willing' was big.  'Discussions' pleased me too. I was quite happy to see 'gentleman' also.  The highest regard I can show a boy in my class is to call him a gentleman.  I have several gentlemen in my midst every day.

I loved seeing, 'courteous', 'enthusiasm' and, of course, 'friendly'.  I was obviously pretty pleased to see that 'learning' had a major part to play.

The rest, I leave to you to rifle through if you care to.  I found the experience truly eye-opening.

More than look at mine, for all you Northern Hemisphere folk who have just started your Summer break, once the painful memories of reporting fades, I suggest you plug your general comments into Wordle... and see what yours looks like in the cold light of a fancy little frequency algorithm.

That is all for now.  More on my student teacher (praccy) and our current philosophy sessions in the coming days... when reports are finally out of the way.

Good evening, beautiful world.

Stardate 19.6.2012

Captain's Log: Supplemental 


Found a site called tagxedo...  managed to not only produce a new 'word cloud' in the shape of the word 'reports', but it is a little easier to use, save as an image and play with as a web-part.
Here's the image:


aaaannnnd if you click on the image, you'll be taken to the web page where you can hover over words and see them enlarged and spun to horizontal.  Groooovy.

That is all for tonight.

Blessings.

1 comment:

Bruce Ferrington said...

Love the idea, el Capitano! Might even use it on my own reports!